Ex-Trump campaign aide pleads guilty to conspiracy, lying
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’ s former campaign deputy Rick Gates pleaded guilty Friday to fraud and lying, pledging to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller on his vast probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Gates was the third former Trump aide to agree to cooperate in exchange for reduced charges by Mueller, who is also examining Moscow’s alleged collusion with the Trump campaign and whether the president illegally sought to obstruct his probe.
The plea deal in a Washington federal court, on charges much reduced from the original ones filed against Gates, immediately put him at odds with his former business partner and ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who refuses to bow to pressure from Mueller to strike a deal.
Manafort has countersued Mueller, accusing the former FBI director of going far beyond his Justice Department mandate in the probe. A new indictment against Manafort accuses him of having secretly paid a group of former senior European politicians more than two million euros (US$2.5 million) to lobby for the government of Ukraine’s former pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych.
Gates and Manafort were originally charged on Oct 30 with multiple counts of laundering US$75 million and tax evasion related to their work from 2006 to 2014 for Yanukovych.
They were also accused of illegally representing a foreign government, Ukraine, as lobbyists without first registering with the US government as foreign agents.
But the charges Gates ultimately pleaded guilty to on Friday were one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States in relation to not reporting offshore banking accounts, and one count of lying over his work as a foreign agent for Ukraine. — AFP